Opportunistic maintenance management for a hybrid flow shop scheduling problem

In this article, an approach to optimize opportunistic maintenance policies was presented to examine the use of opportunities created in preventive maintenance activities. After the operation, maintenance, and repair, a component never gets back to the status of a new one. Hence, assuming that the replacement case is not approached, a maintenance activity is referred to as an imperfect type. In this article, assuming the existence of the imperfect maintenance type, an opportunistic approach based on age threshold values of components is proposed. The maintenance activities in this research focus on the hybrid flow shop problem. Different threshold values are also introduced in this article for failure conditions for a machine. A harmony search algorithm is used to provide optimized values for this proposed approach. The simulation approach is used to calculate the average cost of maintenance. The cost analysis indicates that the proposed approach is better than the corrective policy widely in literature; otherwise, the proposed approach with about 25 percent saving is the best performance.